Crowdscourcing Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3750 words

Crowdscourcing - Term Paper Example Today through crowd sourcing, the company can use a huge number of less technical people to carry out complex and highly ingenious tasks at very low costs. As a result, the basic idea behind crowdsourcing is to increase productivity while at the same time reducing involved costs in the production process (Mau, 2004). This involves the use of internet where the company solicits feedback from a community of many active and passionate people, which will help the company in significantly reducing the time that it would take to collect data about the same information in the field through a research or other formal focus groups. Therefore, by having customers involved in the branding activities, marketing and the product design and development processes, the organization can greatly save on the staffing costs required and cater for the numerous risks and uncertainties in the market place (Mau, 2004). History The process of requiring customers to have an input in developing products is not new. However, open-source software has changed the approach by making it possible for many people to be involved in such a process. In today’s technology, it is possible to have numerous people undertake tasks that would seem too complex for their level of technical knowledge, mainly driven by factors such as the development of blogs social networks such as Facebook, twitter, MySpace and YouTube. This has made the traditional differences producers and consumers to vanish and leave a thin line that becomes hard to isolate, leading to a market that has a collective intelligence (Brabham, 2008). In other words, in the market today, it is possible to access people’s passion, knowledge, their creative ideas and insightful thinking. This translates to improved production and increased innovations numerous minds are brought together in an economy driven by intellectuals. Open source code, the invention of Stallman an MIT graduate that dates back to 1983 has made crowdsourcing in the IT a great success and has helped companies to reap big from crowdsourcing. This led to development of Unix operating system by 1991 where the developer Linus Torvalds, a computer scientists based in Finland requested ideas from people on how to develop a free operating system, which led to the current Linus operating system, which is the globally largest and world most successful open code software today (Howe, 2008). In interface design, users create socially adaptable interfaces that address interface complexity where users come up with customizations linked to specific tasks, which are then made available to an online community through an online repository. Once the users have created a collection of test sets, the users then customize the interfaces created with a keyword search in finding and installing specific task sets, resulting to a situation where users can issue direct commands to the interface. Therefore, crowdsourcing has its origin from academic researchers w ho designed digital resources that supported research and data interpretation methods, which involved visualization of data, computational analysis, data mining and simulations (Oomen & Aroyio, 2011). Consequently, in interface design, the result was that users were henceforth able to automate difficult tasks to compute,

Cartel Behavior and Amateurism in College Sports Essay

Cartel Behavior and Amateurism in College Sports - Essay Example Surprisingly, those working hard to produce the rents are African-American athletes while the whites come out as the beneficiaries. This discourse takes an in-depth critique of Lawrence Kahn’s article and in the process evaluates facts that he outlines. The paper also separates facts from fictitious information in the article. Critique Lawrence Kahn explains that African-American athletes produce the rents benefited by white Americans. He mentions that the African-American sportspersons spent their rent on facilities, head coaches salaries, and nonrevenue sports. The football programs earn revenue from accounting profits. This also happens in the field of basketball. Evaluation of the role of NCAA appears at two levels. One extreme end is people who believe that efforts by NCAA to restrict payments to sportspeople enhance the value of sports by upholding amateurism. The other group holds that NCAA is a cartel that restricts compensation to sportsmen and women. Since its incept ion, the NCAA has been controlling the capacity for its members to access televised games. This started in 1984. This is a typical characteristic of a cartel where it prevents members from accessing and doing business with other competing firms in the industry. This is to avoid a share of the rents produced by sportsmen and women. The cartel wants to enjoy all the money. This is the reason that informed the formation of College Football Association (CFA). The behavior of NCAA towards is enough proof that it is a cartel. Cartels thrive on threats and sanctions. The NCAA threatened to expel any school and higher institution of learning that would sign a different contract following CFA’s readiness to negotiate a different and parallel contract with NBC. Threats by NCAA amounted to schools under CFA loosing on the revenue from the basketball tournament. This is total tyranny. In the modern liberal market, business associations and companies cannot thrive on threats and financial embargos. Finally, the NCAA succeeded in enjoying all the revenues generated from football television rents. The change in broadcasting rights appeared for the first time in college sports following a successful court petition by the University of Oklahoma and the University of Georgia. Cases in the judiciary point to the fact that indeed the NCAA is a cartel. Courts proved in 1995 that it was engaged in backroom dirty tricks to limit salaries for assistant coaches. An association existing for the welfare of members such as NCAA needs to engage making lives for their members. However, NCAA does the reverse. It is very difficult to comprehend what good is in limiting a pay for members and proudly claim to be generating a fair playground for your members. Lawrence Kahn cannot purport to justify the role of NCAA to limit compensation as efforts towards enhancing sports by maintaining amateurism. Kahn explains the value of amateurism by stating the large of members in NCAA makes it dif ficult for it to put ceilings on earnings of sportsmen and women. He holds that a possibility of NCAA failing to prevent a competitive market among players due to the high number of members is farfetched. This point by Lawrence Khan does not hold water. NCAA is cartel and members of such an association have to operate within the rules. Therefore, the rules apply to all irrespective of the size of membership.